The Ministry of National Defense sent Lieutenant General Liu Pei-chih (劉沛智), deputy chief of the General Staff for personnel, to a quetion-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan on Thursday last week. In response to a question put to him by Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Shih-ying (蔡適應), Liu said that the armed forces are meeting targets for recruitment and retention rates, but more than 4,600 people last year and more than 3,000 people in the first nine months of this year had applied to terminate their service prematurely on the grounds of not being fit for active service.
Starting last year, total assigned armed forces personnel is to increase annually to more than 50,000 by 2029, Liu said.
Difficulty in adapting can affect people in any situation, whether it is studying at a military academy or working in a civilian job. When I was in my first year at a military academy, I wanted to drop out because of the heavy physical strain, the centralized management and the lack of freedom in the military.
However, after attending guidance meetings with officers and counselors, and talking the matter over with my parents, I canceled my application to withdraw.
Following this decision, I not only graduated without a hitch, but went on to serve 20 years in the military.
The military is like a closed society. The unit in which one serves is like a small company, in which there are all kinds of people. Whatever happens in ordinary society can more or less also happen in the army, such as fraud, drunk driving, drug abuse, jealousy and snitching.
However, when such things happen in the relatively closed and unfree conditions of the armed forces, it makes many people want to quit.
The 7,600 people in nearly two years leaving the military on the grounds of being unfit for active service is not a small number, so the Ministry of National Defense should give the issue serious attention. After all, Taiwan’s falling birthrate is already making it harder to recruit people.
The ministry could improve the situation by offering more guidance sessions to those who have trouble adapting to military life.
If necessary, such people can be transferred from their original units to give them another chance to adapt. This might reduce the number of people who leave the military before completing their service, which takes a toll on the military’s strength.
Chen Hung-hui is a student counselor at a university.
Translated by Julian Clegg
With each passing day, the threat of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) assault on Taiwan grows. Whatever one’s view about the history, there is essentially no question that a PRC conquest of Taiwan would mark the end of the autonomy and freedom enjoyed by the island’s 23 million people. Simply put, the PRC threat to Taiwan is genuinely existential for a free, democratic and autonomous Taiwan. Yet one might not know it from looking at Taiwan. For an island facing a threat so acute, lethal and imminent, Taiwan is showing an alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
As Taiwan’s only national university research institute focused on indigenous cultures, it is incredibly regrettable that students from National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) have continued the horrible history of Taichung Municipal Taichung First Senior High School and National Taiwan University by expressing harmful, discriminatory views and writing defamatory statements against an indigenous university department. Hiding behind anonymous usernames, people have written online about indigenous students from the NDHU College of Indigenous Studies being allowed to light fires in a farmhouse next to the school’s experimental millet fields. The posters bemoan how students in other programs are somehow not permitted to light